Category Archives: Language

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Standards Curricula Program

NIST Headquarters (Click on image)

2024 Update: NIST Awards Funding to 8 Universities to Advance Standards Education


The Standards Coordination Office of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducts standards-related programs, and provides knowledge and services that strengthen the U.S. economy and improve the quality of life.  Its goal is to equip U.S. industry with the standards-related tools and information necessary to effectively compete in the global marketplace. 

Every year it awards grants to colleges and universities through its Standards Services Curricula Cooperative Agreement Program  to provide financial assistance to support curriculum development for the undergraduate and/or graduate level. These cooperative agreements support the integration of standards and standardization information and content into seminars, courses, and learning resources. The recipients will work with NIST to strengthen education and learning about standards and standardization. 

The 2019 grant cycle will require application submissions before April 30, 2019 (contingent upon normal operation of the Department of Commerce).  Specifics about the deadline will be posted on the NIST and ANSI websites.  We will pass on those specifics as soon as they are known.

The winners of the 2018 grant cycle are Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University,  Oklahoma State University, and Texas A&M University. (Click here)

The University of Michigan received an award during last year’s grant cycle (2017).   An overview of the curriculum — human factors in automotive standards  — is linked below:

NIST Standards Curricula INTRO Presentation _ University of Michigan Paul Green

Information about applying for the next grant cycle is available at this link (Click here) and also by communicating with Ms. Mary Jo DiBernardo (301-975-5503; maryjo.dibernardo@nist.gov)

LEARN MORE:

Click here for link to the previous year announcement.

Technical Requirements for Weighing & Measuring Devices

 

 

Winter Moon

 

They’re stingier now, the rowdy boys, in pitching stones
that rattle your shuttered windows;
they don’t deprive you of your sleep; and hugging
the threshold, the door stays shut

that used to swing so easily
on its hinges. Less and less do you hear now:
“While I, who am yours, am dying all night long,
you, Lydia, are sleeping?”

You will age, in turn, and, spurned in the lonely alley,
you’ll wail at the arrogance of paramours
while the rising Thracian wind rages
in the dark of the moon.

Then you’ll feel how the blazing heat
and lust that maddens mares
will rage around your ulcered liver,
not without a sob

that excited boys take more delight
in green ivy than drab myrtle,
and dedicate sere leaves to the east wind,
winter’s companion.

 

23 BC | Rome

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Randall Thompson’s “Frostiana” is a choral cycle based on the poems of Robert Frost. The cycle consists of settings for mixed chorus and piano, and it was premiered in 1959. “Frostiana” was commissioned to celebrate the bicentennial of the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, and it features seven of Frost’s poems set to music by Thompson.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is one of the poems included in the “Frostiana” cycle. The composition captures the reflective and contemplative mood of Frost’s poem, where the narrator pauses to admire the beauty of a snowy evening in a quiet forest. Randall Thompson’s musical setting adds another layer to Frost’s words, enhancing the emotional impact of the poem.

Thompson’s approach in “Frostiana” is characterized by its accessibility and tonal clarity. His settings aim to convey the meaning and atmosphere of Frost’s poetry through the expressive power of choral music. The entire “Frostiana” cycle is a celebration of both Thompson’s skill as a composer and Frost’s enduring contribution to American literature.

Acoustics

 

High Michigan American English

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Lingua Franca 300

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English for Technical Professionals

IEEE English for Technical Professionals is a 14-hour online learning program designed to provide non-native English speakers with a working knowledge of English techniques and vocabulary that are essential for working in today’s technical workplace.

 

IEEE English for Technical Professionals

Electropedia: The World’s Online Electrotechnical Vocabulary

Standards January: Language

“Music does an end run around language” — James Taylor

“Dear students, faculty, distinguished guests, parents,

I’m so proud to have been offered this honorary degree by the @New England Conservatory of music. When I learned that my friend Manny Axe was also being honored, I thought: some great company. But my mother would be proud. She studied here in the early 1940s.

I want to talk today about language, music and the human condition. I realize that to talk about music is an exercise in futility. Critics do it and, I have no doubt, your professors. But Music does an end run around language and goes straight to the heart. It defies our efforts at judgement and control: it either connects or it doesn’t. I suppose one might be persuaded to appreciate a particular piece of music but that sounds pretty cerebral to me. Music is spiritual food.

The human condition, it seems to me, is that we are split, bifurcated. We are a product of the natural world, of the co-evolved skin of life on the surface of this miraculously unlikely planet.
But we put ourselves slightly above and at some remove from that natural world. And we’re always looking for trouble. Our very successful survival strategy is to analyze, predict and control everything around us.

In the book of Genesis, God gives Adam the job of naming everything. And that’s what we do, we name and categorize everything.

This is a language of names for things but you can’t sit in the word “chair”, you can’t climb the word ”tree”, in fact the only word that is what it says… is the word, “word”.
Music is a language, we use it to communicate emotions, but it’s not representative, like this language of names: music feels real.

Analyze predict and control. It’s a defensive tactic and we are suspicious and distrustful, not only of the natural world but of our own animal selves. Of this meat-suit we live in, with its appetites and urges, which humiliates and embarrasses us and which, in the end, will betray us with its mortality.

Maybe this is a good point to tell you my favorite joke: what did the Zen Buddhist say to the hotdog vendor? Make me one with everything. It’s a very Dad joke.

I’m pretty sure our new puppy is “one with everything” and, when I was a kid, I think I was too. But over time I learned self-consciousness. I also assembled a worldview, a sort of consensus reality. These are wonderful tools. They allow us to cooperate with strangers. Actually, I think that’s a pretty decent definition of civilization: cooperation among strangers. But it comes at a cost. The price of our egocentric identity is separation and isolation and we very much want to escape. To give the rational humanist construct the slip and get back to the garden. Get back, JoJo… Music can make that happen for a while.

How does music make us “one with everything”? It’s a mystery. But it might be partially because music IS real. It obeys the laws of the physical universe: an octave is half the frequency of the one above it and twice that of the one below. A fifth, an octave, a third, a seventh, the whole overtone series, is a physical, mathematical reality.

And live music, performed in an actual, non-virtual space, with an audience of fellow humans can be truly transcendent, a communal emotional event. Covid and its hiatus of nearly two years has brought home to me just how much I need it.

That’s what I want to leave you with and encourage you to do: make live music for live people. Whatever it takes and however you can manage it, alone or with other players, get your music in front of people. Make us one with everything.”

Standards Massachusetts

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